


Bart, on the street

by always_a_birthday_girl



Series: nighthawks(looking for baggage that goes with mine) [2]
Category: DCU, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Everyone Is Cold, M/M, Rent AU, Rent AU is not a thing, bart as a stripper, dont listen to me im crazy, its becoming a thing, lots of swearing, mentions of dead Wally West, rentverse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 05:15:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6142654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_a_birthday_girl/pseuds/always_a_birthday_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he was a wild one even before Wally, and now he's spinning like one of those nauseating teacup rides until a bystander slams the brakes on him and he falls into Jaime's arms for some kind of happy ending but he's not going to surrender so easily because why should he?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bart, on the street

It was Wally’s own fault; he always went too fast, sucking down four lines of coke--one, two, three, four, bam--in seconds, like there was someone waiting on the other side of his high that he had to get back to and couldn’t stand to be without. It wasn’t Bart’s fault, even though he was the one who dared Wally to do it.  
It couldn’t be Bart’s fault.

  
And now he’s showering in some hotel room(nicest place he’s been in weeks), scrubbing the trails of glitter mascara off his cheeks and some guy’s cum out of his ass, trying to remember last night but it’s a blur of leather and lights and he’s not sure he wants to. He saw them carry Wally’s body out yesterday afternoon; and then it’s all flashes of purple and pink and emotions and grinding his body down that fucking pole like nothing else mattered in the world because, right then, nothing did.  
There’s a stack of takeout containers on the nightstand when he gets out of the shower, and a hundred-dollar bill tucked under the box of mu shi pork. The key card to the room sits next to it.

  
Bert doesn’t waste too much time missing the faceless fuckbuddy who paid for two meals and the best night’s sleep he’s had since he started crashing with Roy the drug dealer, Cassie the runaway, and Tim the slut; he just scarfs down the food and packages the leftovers in a plastic bag with a huge smiley face and random Asian characters emblazoned on the side.

  
Then it’s all business: fishing his favorite garter out from under the bed, shimmying into the blue pleated skirt he finds under the pillow, picking his net halter top off of the TV set and slipping his leather jacket over it. The hundred he tucks in his underwear; the bag of Chinese food goes over his arm.  
He looks around the room, making sure he didn’t forget anything. Then he filches all of the tiny toiletries from the bathroom sink and splits, his platform boots sinking into the plush magenta rug as he closes the door behind him. The guests and concierge in the lobby all stare at him openly, which is just rude, but the doorman doesn’t, so Bart makes a huge deal out of pulling a twenty from his lace panties and tucking it into the stupefied man’s front pocket.

  
Fuck the upper class. None of them have fun.

  
He strolls through East Gotham like he owns the place, ignoring the mildly horrified looks he draws from the respectable citizens who live there, feeling himself come down from his high like a car approaching a stop sign, slowing by increments until he can hardly tell if he’s moving at all. Being sober makes him disagreeable; being high makes him crazy. It’s a hell of a choice.

  
‘Round about Palm Street he starts thinking about cruising by Wally’s apartment, seeing if his cousin or his cousin’s best friend, Dick, are up for sneaking into the movies and catching a marathon; then he remembers Wally’s dead, and Dick’s probably balls-deep in Wally’s girlfriend by now, so he scratches that idea and sits down on a park bench to cry.

  
What else can a guy do?

  
“Um--hey, are you okay?” some random guy asks, after a good six minutes have passed and Bart’s starting to consider moving on before one of the soccer moms lurking nearby kicks him out of the park.

  
He looks up, and there’s this Mexican guy looking back at him, frowning in concern and tugging nervously on the drawstrings of his gray hoodie. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d run in Bart’s crowd, but he doesn’t look like he belongs in this neighborhood, either.

  
“I don’t know,” Bart says. “But I could use a high right now.”

  
So he drags the guy--who introduces himself as Jaime, and Bart introduces himself as I Don’t Give A Fuck--down into the shadier part of town, near where Bart’s club and the run-down building he squats in and a bunch of other familiar places are, and hits up Roy for something strong.

  
Roy deals in next to everything, but Bart’s never seen him use once and he can’t decide if that’s genius or fucked up.

  
Roy runs a hand over his shaved head, makes Bart promise to go straight home, no detours, no side trips, no visiting that crack house for more because I will hear about it and I will end you, and then he sets them up with some crystal and Bart voluntarily forgets everything Roy just told him because, overprotective much?

  
He leads Jaime back to the apartment, not because Roy told him to, but because he wants to and he’s in the habit of doing what he wants, and the two of them inhale their way to the stars and it’s marginally less shitty than anything else that’s happened in Bart’s life lately, so there’s that.

  
And somewhere between the acrid sting of the third round and the brain-busting shoot upwards that makes him feel like the universe is exploding behind his eyelids and he’s just on the edge of not being able to breathe and everything. is. just. better, he shoves Jaime down onto the holey couch and straddles him, sees his own lights reflected in Jaime’s cow-brown eyes, and falls a little bit into despair and a little bit in love as Jaime encourages him with open-mouthed kisses and Bart gets a taste of what it’s like to be in charge.

  
Still in yesterday’s skirt and last night’s refractory, he strips Jaime down and presses him into the couch, mouthing kisses down his neck and promises up his ass and it’s all so wonderful and he’ll remember none of it in the morning, but right now it’s afternoon, then night, then one a.m., and he’s coming and gone and coming again and Jaime’s hands dig into his thighs like iron vises and he sees his own painted fingernails scrape through Jaime’s blue-tipped hair, and there’s a whole world out there but it mostly just looks like Jaime and a couch the color of vomit and that’s perfectly okay.

  
It’s not his fault that Wally died. No one can pin that on him. It wasn’t his fault.

  
But later, when Bart’s picking his up underwear off the floor and poking Jaime to see if he’s still breathing--it’s touch and go for a minute, but the boy is--and the high is wearing off, he thinks that maybe, just a little, it is his fault. Because he’s the one who springs from partner to partner like a pinball and bounces off the walls and downs Jaeger bombs like fucking cups of coffee in the morning and says to his cousin(the only family he has/had in the world) “I bet you can’t survive four lines at once”, knowing full well that Wally will never turn down an opportunity to win a bet.

  
So maybe it’s his fault.  
Just a little.

  
\----

Jaime’s got this apartment on Fifth Street--he lives alone with a picture of his family and a fridge full of soy sauce.

  
“They aren’t dead or anything,” he tells Bart, taking out a carton of milk and a tub of frosting and setting them on his counter. “Just, y’know, not here.”

  
Bart giggles, his stockinged toe tracing circles on the linoleum floor. He’s sitting at Jaime’s kitchen table, which takes up half the room, smoking a joint. Everything’s hilarious. “My folks aren’t here either,” he says. “But that’s ‘cause they’re dead. Wanna hear something fucked up?”

  
Jaime shakes his head, no, because he’s a boring stiff who never wants to hear anything interesting, and Bart tells him anyway because that’s how he rolls. In between tokes and chuckles, he relates the sad, sordid tale of the Allen-West family, from the mad cow disease that took Grandpa Barry to the freak circus shooting that slayed Aunt May.

  
Then he laughs at Jaime’s horrifed face and takes it all back. “I made it up, man. My parents live uptown with the rest of the middle-class scumbags. They threw me out for painting my nails and fucking boys.”

  
Jaime’s relief is so profound, Bart doesn’t even feel bad for stealing Tim’s life story, or for making up an AHS-inspired history of murder in his family.

  
And the truth--that Bart was an only kid who got the raw end of a custody deal, and Wally was the only person to give a damn about it--stays right where Bart likes it, nestled between his unusued pride and his bruised self-respect in the department of his brain that deals with unnecessary complications.

  
He and Jaime smear blue frosting on anything they can get their hands on and chase it down with milk and, later, vodka; that’s when Jaime starts frosting Bart instead of stale graham crackers and dried soba noodles; and Bart sprawls out on the kitchen table to let Jaime inside of him and thinks, this isn’t such a bad way to live, even if no one has enough money for the fucking rent.

  
They move from the table to the floor, where Jaime thrusts against him in slow, patient, agonizing strokes, and then Bart drags him into the hallway, shoving him against the wall and running the business end of his high heel up Jaime’s calf, teasing, and then Jaime’s reaching behind him to open a door and they fall into a bedroom that’s a blur of high school pennants and blue bedsheets and Panic!At The Disco posters.

  
There’s half a second, maybe a little longer than that, where Bart wonders what on earth he’s doing here; as he sees the evidence of Jaime’s life spread out in front of him and the boy--who previously was a person, but mostly just a body with a brain that spouted ideas Bart didn’t hate since they mostly involved sex--becomes a real boy, and not some image in Bart’s head.

  
This is what Jaime’s bedroom looks like.

  
This is what his bed feels like.

  
This is what a person named Jaime sounds like when he comes, all gasping breath and soft swears in a foreign tongue, and Bart’s name over and over like a chant. Bart grasps the back of the other boy’s neck, refusing to pull out, and shuts his eyes tightly, wrapping his heels around Jaime’s calves and ignoring his squeak of protest, of pain.  
Sex has happened so many times, in so many ways, for Bart that he’s forgotten what it’s like to do it with a real person; with someone he knows, or at least knows the name of.

And maybe it’s the Wally thing, or just a flash of loneliness, or Bart’s getting old and tired; but as he releases Jaime, he realizes that he wants to know more about him.

  
“What do you do?” he asks, arching his back to stretch his kinking muscles, slipping a fist under his hips to massage the base of his spine.

  
“Whaddya mean, what do I do?” Jaime mumbles, rolling off Bart and onto his pillow, taking most of the sheets with him.

  
“You work, right?” Bart thumbs the other boy’s ear insistently, refusing to let him sleep. “I’m a stripper. So what do you do?”

  
Jaime blinks slow, languid eyes, taking that in. Then he sighs and scrubs at his hairline, face melting into a scowl. “I’m a busboy. Don’t laugh.”

  
Bart laughs anyway, because he’s a dick and because it’s funny and because he just feels like laughing, caught in the bubbly after-sex high like a minnow up a stream. “You’re a Mexican busboy?”

  
Jaime shoves his shoulder, pushing him dangerously close to the edge of the single bed, looking full-on murderous as he does so. “Shut up,” he whines. “I told you not to laugh.”

  
“I fucked a Mexican busboy,” Bart muses. “Doesn’t that sound like the perfect name for a punk rock song?”

  
Jaime yanks the pillow over his head and pretends to sleep, and Bart entertains himself with tracing constellations in the glow-in-the-dark stars on Jaime’s ceiling until he checks the time and it’s past six and he has to gather up his clothes and go before he’s even later to work than he usually is.

  
“Where you going?” Jaime mumbles, face still in the pillow.

  
“Dickie’s bar--work,” Bart replies quietly, and then(though he usually doesn’t make promises), “I’ll be back later.”

  
“If I’m gone, key’s under the gargoyle outside,” Jaime tells him, waving a hand arbitrarily in his direction without looking. His arm falls back on the bed, heavy as a stone, and Bart bends down to kiss his wrist impulsively.

  
“That’s dangerous, sweetheart,” he says, feeling the need to warn Jaime against the dangers of poor home security.

  
“Go fuck yourself.”  
\----

**Author's Note:**

> I had a second chapter for this. But I lost it. Because that's the kind of person I am. It's sort of a terrible AU anyway and I'm mildly embarrassed by it, but also too lazy to take it down.  
> All of this is to say thank you for reading my short nonsensical thing that was way too heavily influenced by my Panic!at the Disco phase.
> 
> That aside, I think "I Fucked A Mexican Busboy" would be a badass band name. Just sayin'.


End file.
